Decaf - Coffeeish

Years ago, when I was the cappuccino maker to the stars, every now and then I would get someone who would order a decaf latte with skim milk and no foam. My knee jerk response was to say, "What's the point?" Of course that would have been rude, and I would have been an unemployed barista.

Decaffeinated coffee is one of those oddities. Growing up it meant Sanka. You remember Sanka right? It's that instant decaf coffee that your mother may have served at dinner parties to people who didn't want coffee at night. It was that small jar of crystals in our freezer, and truly my mom only had it at dinner parties.

Decaf, for those who aren't clear on this, is a process used to extract caffeine from coffee. Yes, I know all of you are giggling and saying, "Come on why do that?" Still there are different processes to remove the caffeine.

The most common method is Swiss Water Process. It truly was developed in Switzerland in the 1930s. These days most of the process is done by The Swiss Water Decaffeinated Coffee Company in British Columbia, Canada. Green Beans are immersed in water to remove the caffeine, but there are some essential oils which could also be removed. With the Swiss Water Process, the green beans are put in water with the desirable oils and properties. The is called Green Coffee Extract(GCE). The GCE is then filtered to only take the caffeine out. This is repeated until the 99% of the caffeine is removed.

I'm going to be honest, I think this is a lot of effort for a cup of coffee which doesn't really taste like coffee to me. I have gone through a decaf stage in my life, and I found very few decafs which actually retained the coffee flavor I liked. God bless Intelligentsia Coffee. At that time they had a decaf I could drink which truly tasted like coffee. It has been about 10 years since I have had decaf, so I hope there are some roasters out there that can get decaf to taste like coffee.

I do think there is one benefit to decaf. Coffee speeds the metabolism(at least temporarily), and I found when I was trying to lose weight, the more coffee I drank, the more I ate(this is before I started running). Drinking decaf gave me the coffee like taste(kind of), without having my pot a day of regular.

Still I go back to my barista thought when I hear someone order decaf - What's the point?

Charlie